countering the drug trade. It is true that, from time to time, collaborative projects involving joint patrols, shared intelligence, and common border monitoring have occurred—sometimes stimulated by outside encouragement or pressure. But, on the whole, intraregional counternarcotics efforts have been slow to develop and have proven to be easily derailed. Few have been especially inspired or creative. While some unofficial transnational networks of mid-level personnel interacting in the implementation of antidrug measures have coalesced, these have tended to be more fragile in Central America than in a more cohesive, developed, wealthy, and technologically advanced region such as western Europe.11 Given the lack of resources and training, cross-national law-enforcement networks have been prone to lapse into inactivity.
Deep-seated concerns that neighbors or more powerful countries might infringe on sovereignty have also hampered cooperative antidrug initiatives.12 With seven states sharing a relatively small region, Central America has numerous land and maritime boundaries. Despite increasing interdependence and globalization, borders remain highly relevant to the drug trade and efforts to counter it.13 Whether on land, sea, or air, borders have tended to be sufficiently fluid to permit traffickers reasonably easy ingress and egress, but they have then bedeviled authorities trying to stop the rapid passage of drug shipments. Furthermore, free trade policies have brought expedited inspections of vehicles, border posts open for longer hours, and ready access to neighboring countries.14 Criminals have often easily crossed the region’s porous borders, either merging into legitimate traffic or simply ignoring customs posts and entering where they liked. Foreign traffickers have suddenly appeared in a country during a transshipment operation and then just as abruptly vanished. The inability of authorities, whether police or military, to cross Central American boundaries in hot pursuit, indeed, to exercise any of a range of law-enforcement functions on another state’s soil, has hampered official efforts to contend effectively with transnational organizations able to move speedily and alter plans nimbly.15
In addition, across Central America, armed forces have proven to be largely inadequate to provide for national security when confronted with the asymmetrical threats posed by transnational criminal groups. Because for many years patrols of airspace have been inadequate and radar coverage limited, most unauthorized drug flights have proceeded unhindered. For its part, while the U.S. military has long tracked drug planes and forwarded such intelligence to the DEA and national authorities in Central America, the U.S. Air Force has not been constituted as a law-enforcement agency and has been of limited utility in stopping aerial drug smuggling.16
Moreover, since the navies and coast guards of these bridge states typically have had only a tenuous grip on offshore activities, local authorities have infrequently intercepted maritime shipments, unless tipped off by the DEA. In any event, as fears of communist subversion have diminished and democracy has taken root, governments across the region have drawn down military forces.17 In some places the deemphasis of national security has helped to ensure the ready transit of drugs, but in others, officers have searched avidly for opportunities for additional compensation—a boon to drug trafficking in those states in which the military has exercised substantial control. Capitalizing on their extraordinary resources, drug organizations have gained extensive experience in corrupting those who might oppose them, including members of militaries.
At sea the U.S. Coast Guard, the principal maritime antidrug force in international waters off Central America, has not been able to enter the territorial waters of these bridge states to enforce drug laws absent specific agreements authorizing joint operations. Thus, between 1991 and 2003 the U.S. government signed cooperative agreements for maritime counterdrug operations in all five of the countries we studied.18 These so-called ship-rider agreements typically enabled the coast guard to proceed with patrols or in hot pursuit so long as an official of the state in whose territorial waters the operation was occurring was on board to authorize formally any law-enforcement action. All told, this has proven to be a particularly successful antidrug initiative. Nevertheless, while these treaties were being conceived, negotiated, and approved, maritime drug smuggling soared. In addition, having to follow the procedures laid out has sometimes proven cumbersome.19 Traffickers have periodically succeeded in evading pursuit, even after a U.S. ship has spotted their vessel and started to give chase, and in Honduras and Panama supplementary implementing arrangements had to be designed to correct flaws in the treaties. Indeed, the ship-rider approach has been ideally suited only for those times when the U.S. Coast Guard was conducting planned operations near a country’s territorial waters and could get a local official on board before suspected vessels were sighted.
Within the Central American states, where large drug loads have been seized and leading traffickers arrested, the U.S. government has frequently led the way. Operating through its DEA, the U.S. Department of Justice has had the financial and technological resources needed to develop intelligence on upcoming drug shipments. DEA agents have operated out of U.S. embassies across the region, recruiting informants and cultivating ties with the local authorities in charge of actually arresting traffickers and seizing drugs.20 However, the DEA, too, has limited resources. The budget for Central America has been modest, and the number of agents assigned to the region has not been large. Their attention has been chiefly directed toward major organizations and trafficking ventures, rather than smaller criminal groups moving lesser quantities.
Although the DEA has been institutionally stable, retaining most policies and personnel despite periodic government transitions and occasional scandals, such has often not been the case with the national police forces with which it has cooperated. In Central America constant turnover in personnel and other institutional difficulties have often led to real discontinuity in antidrug law enforcement. When faced with soaring international trafficking, Central American governments have frequently responded by terminating and then reorganizing counternarcotics institutions when they have become discredited. Governments have removed antidrug officials to eliminate suspect individuals, punish lack of success, offer up a scapegoat, or reward political patrons. Whether such turnover has been merited or not, in most of the bridge states the reporting requirements, chains of command, even the names of antidrug units have repeatedly changed. This constant state of flux has contributed to ongoing institutional weaknesses.
Yet another factor promoting Central American drug trafficking has been the conflicting and overlapping law-enforcement jurisdictions. Typically, many national actors have had antidrug responsibilities: customs officials; naval, army, and air force personnel; antinarcotics, anticorruption, and other special units; and multiple police forces, run by the judiciary and by federal or provincial authorities.21 Many of these units have been secretive, reluctant to share information or otherwise cooperate with one another. Latin American militaries have been especially so and have frequently taken advantage of their distinctive legal status as well.22 Infighting over turf has then commonly occurred, as different units have grappled with one another for scarce resources, for their vision of strategies and objectives, for public and governmental attention, and on occasion, for assuming the prime position to reap bribes.
Furthermore, the complexities, confusions, sometimes even chaos in enforcement have been overlaid on often patently inadequate laws dealing with drug trafficking. Apart from Belize, which has struggled with a somewhat different set of legal problems, the rest of the region has been firmly rooted in civil law traditions.
